Although many senior Democrats in the US Congress, including Senator Hillary Clinton, had warmly supported the Bush proposal to bend the nuclear regime in favour of India. Obama was not one of them.

His attempts to deny life-time supplies of nuclear fuel to future Indian reactors, through the so-called Obama amendment, almost wrecked the nuclear deal. It needed Bush’s strong political will to overcome the Obama amendment in the bilateral negotiations on the 123 agreement during 2007.

Although he eventually voted for the Hyde Act that facilitates US civil nuclear cooperation with India, Obama lent his political voice to the non-proliferation groups in Washington seeking to undermine it.

Many of the non-proliferation activists, who are likely to fill crucial arms-control jobs in the Obama administration, genuinely believe Bush gave away the store to India and that the deal needs to be renegotiated to make it more “balanced”. (That should be a warning to the BJP leader, L.K. Advani, who has claimed with some bombast that he wants to rework the deal.)

Any reopening of the terms of the nuclear deal under a Democratic administration will inevitably focus on getting India to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and accept a moratorium on the production of nuclear materials for weapons, the precursor to the Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty.

Obama has promised to push both the CTBT and the FMCT that Bush has avoided imposing on India. Unlike the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, Obama has not yet made the promise to implement the Indo-US nuclear deal in its present form.

... contd.